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The subject of this book is marginalia – what readers write in the margin and how readers underline and annotate books. Sherman describes a big historical shift. We tend to see writing in books as an act of defacement. For example, if you return your library copy of Sherman’s book with passages that have been highlighted you will receive a hefty fine. But readers in the Renaissance thought that if you didn’t leave notes in the margin of a book then you were being lazy and passive, because you weren’t doing the job of engaging with the text and answering back to it.

Sherman showed that until two or three hundred years ago, children were taught how to write in books. There were very conventional systems of how you were supposed to take notes in the margins. At the same time, until wood pulp was used in paper making in the 19th century, paper was a very expensive commodity, and because people didn’t have scrap paper lying about, books became a useful source of raw material. So you find books with shopping lists written in the front, or spaces where people practised their handwriting.

More evidence that the Gordian knots of moral conflict, rather than being unraveled, are simply severed by the sword of technology. New knots reappear in new circumstances, though. For instance, now that there are convenient alternatives to defacing one’s reading material, what is to be done with those who persist in their deviance? Are they to be offered therapy, the hemlock cup, or lifetime banishment to the land of audiobooks?

See, that kind of mercenary spirit is corrosive to the ornamental hermit ethos. We might be misanthropes, but we’re not greedy. I’m well-fed and left in peace to enjoy my scribbling in exchange for some basic chores. What more do we need? (For any interested readers, I also keep another blog, much less-frequently updated, where I collect quotations from my reading to meditate upon, usually centered on the theme of the tragic nature of existence.)

The tone of Andy Richter and Judd Apatow’s tweets was not that they were disappointed that C.K. had done a bit that wasn’t funny at a show neither of them had attended. No, Richter and Apatow are outraged. And outrage is a double-edged sword, isn’t it? Comics don’t want to admit they’re outraged. Because outrage traditionally makes you a butt of jokes, a bit like the teenaged pearl-clutching brigade C.K. mocked.

What is driving this episode of cultural citizens’ arrest is that the Parkland kids are untouchable. They can’t be made fun of. They are . . . icons. Comics can’t say that because labeling the Parkland kids sacred cows would acknowledge the existence of sacred cows. And they want to reserve the right to barbecue everybody else’s sacred cows.

It’s true that the woke left are the new Moral Majority, and it’s deliciously funny that, like all self-righteous prigs, they honestly don’t see it. Still, not to overanalyze a comedy bit, but I thought the premise of C.K.’s joke, that youthful rebellion should always be cumulative in one direction, the direction of thoughtless hedonism, was pretty flat. And not to lean too heavily on generational stereotypes, but doesn’t it almost seem like a caricature of self-satisfied Summer of Love attitudes to take pride in the idea of your children being even more “sex, drugs, and rock ‘n’ roll” than you were at their age? How far can things go in one overindulgent direction before it gets predictable and boring?

A friend of mine has an academic career centered on video games and LARPing. Her husband is a guitarist. Her teenage son, she once confided to me, was causing her concern because he seemed to be showing, well, almost Young Republican tendencies. He was interested in the stock market and making money! She was genuinely baffled as to why he would feel the need to differ from their example. “We’re artsy and tolerant!” she actually said to me in bewilderment. How could this Alex P. Keaton have appeared in their right-thinking household like Milton Friedman springing from Jerry Garcia’s forehead? Shouldn’t the old dialectical tension between the thesis of parental authority and the antithesis of adolescent contrariness have resolved itself in the peaceful synthesis of ageless domestic utopia, enabling each individual to create subversive art in the morning, tend an organic vegetable garden in the afternoon, and share free love in the evening, in accordance with their whims? Interestingly, her older daughter superficially adopted all the trappings of hippie nostalgia to which her mom was sympathetic, from tie-dyed shirts to pot smoking, while still being quite angry and traditionally rebellious, rather than archly skeptical like her brother. Unintended consequences are so fascinating.

And unintended consequences are precisely what the censorious among us can’t tolerate. Ironically enough, many people would like comedy to keep moving cumulatively in one direction, always predictably attacking safe targets like bourgeois morality and organized religion with the same old profane weapons. They want it to remain forever 1984, reprising their role as the rebellious kids in Footloose, outfighting the rednecks and outwitting the Reverend by quoting his own holy book at him, winning the right to dance and party the night away. But taboos are comedy’s natural prey, and currently, all the meatiest taboos are grazing in progressive pastures. Good luck trying to keep nature from taking its course.

I would really wish that you would all try to, I don’t know, we switch – you come here and I go there. Tomorrow it could be seven and then we play against Man City and it could be four, it’s possible. I’m not the smartest person in the world but I’m really not an idiot – not always at least! So it’s really nothing, it’s absolutely not important how many points you are ahead in December, even if it’s the end of December. So what you all create, and I get that, how can you not be positive about us? But all of you are the first, if we drop three points, the next headline is ‘Are they nervous now?’

So that’s an easy job. I would love to be in your situation. We cannot play that game and we don’t do it. Before the game, we all heard about the result of Tottenham, but do you think the party started already? I didn’t see a smile on any face in the dressing room. We came here in this situation with 54 points after 20 matchdays with completely being focused on the situation, and now it’s not about creating headlines, creating stories, it’s still about preparing football matches, play them as good as you can and try to get as many points as you can. That’s it.

On whether it will be different going to Manchester City as the league leaders on Thursday…

What do you think? When we went to City last year, do you think I had the table in the dressing room and said, ‘We are fourth, they are first?’ It’s just not important, we wanted to win the game. We wanted to win the game – the league game, which we obviously didn’t do but we wanted to win it that day and I think everyone who remembers it saw that. The only thing that has changed is that you all ask [about] it, that’s all. It’s not a problem, you can ask what you want. We go to City not with whatever-point distance, we only go there to try to play the best football game we can play. 100 per cent.

On whether the challenge is different depending on whether you’re chasing or leading at the top based on his experiences at Borussia Dortmund…

No, it was not for us [at Dortmund]. That’s the only thing I really remember, that it was not for us and we never thought about it. We were four points ahead for a while then we had Bayern at home. We won the game and Bayern missed a penalty, then we had six or seven points but the next game was the derby and stuff like that. It is a supporters and journalists’ game [talking about the points gap at the top] – and that’s absolutely OK, play it. But we cannot – we cannot be part of it, absolutely not. The only thing that can get annoying after a while is answering the same questions, so maybe you think a little bit about what you ask and not all the time the same! Then you will make my life easier!

You might think there’s nothing sweeter about being a Liverpool fan right now than seeing the club leading the Premier League while playing fantastic football, but I don’t know, I think I enjoy seeing Klopp treat the British sports media with the acidic contempt they so richly deserve just as much, maybe even more. And like I said before, he gives good copy, so they have to keep coming back for more, even as he reminds them again and again how trifling they are.

As the author of a recent book on snobbery, one of Fleming’s new deadly sins, and as of the moment the country’s, perhaps the world’s, leading snobographer, I cannot resist listing the seven deadly sins of snobbery. These are — trumpets please — serving veal and/or iceberg lettuce to company; sending one’s children to land-grant colleges; admitting to having voted for George Bush, the father or the son; owning a Cadillac SUV; mocking denim in public; and openly acknowledging one’s pleasure in slightly overweight women, sweet wine, and Tchaikovsky.

This cult of the will did not end with classical totalitarianism. An ideal of self-creation has returned in 21st-century liberalism. Part of the craze for identity politics is the insistence that each of us can be whoever and whatever we decide to be. Not fate or accident but untrammelled choice must shape our identities. It is an illusory vision, since identity in practice is never unilateral. Everyone’s identity depends on recognition by others – a relationship that must be negotiated, one way or another. Yet pursuing a fantasy of autonomous self-creation has come to be seen as the fundamental human freedom. The fact that the demand for recognition of one’s chosen identity leads to the fragmentation of society into warring groups has not diminished the appeal of this vision.

The problem is that identity is being asserted in a cultural vacuum. According to the ruling philosophy of deconstruction, freedom is not exercised within a matrix of practices and institutions. It is found in anomie – the normless condition of insatiable self-assertion that the French sociologist Emile Durkheim called “the malady of the infinite”. Individual autonomy is fully realised only once the structures that helped form identities in the past have been demolished. True freedom means creating oneself, a god-like power which requires that the norms that defined western civilisation be left behind.

I’m of the opinion that all of this identity-fluidity is going to be one of those era-defining oddities we look back on one day and laugh about. Ah, those crazy twenty-teens... I mean, defining reality according to individual will and whim is one of those things that can only be tolerated as a fringe eccentricity; by definition, it can’t become the norm without unleashing epistemological anarchy. But for whatever mysterious reason, this strange dualism is the thing that a significant number of youth have seized upon in this day and age to deal with the angst and confusion that is central to the human condition — “I’m not actually what I appear to be! I’m something else on the inside and you have to take my word on it!” Eventually, some of them will realize that there is no cure for the human condition, and the marketplace of ideas will present the rest with a new identity that promises to alleviate what the old one couldn’t. Ploosa shawnje.

The Lady of the House had a former acquaintance who is, in the parlance of our times, an “otherkin.” That is, this person “identifies” as an extinct apex predator. (How conventional. Always an apex predator! Never an insect or a bacteria!) As I tried to make sense of this (which was new to me at the time) and articulate my disbelief, I offered an analogy. Imagine you had a friend of average height, I said. Imagine that this friend is very sensitive about his height and wishes he had been several inches taller. Now, imagine that he insists that you refer to him as tall when talking about him in the third person. Imagine that he urges you to warn him to duck his head when entering a low doorway. Imagine that he gets upset and casts aspersions upon your character if you hesitate. Wouldn’t you feel like telling him that it would be much better for everyone if he just accepted reality for what it is, rather than trying like Procrustes to stretch and mutilate it to fit his wishes? I feel like I’m being ordered to participate in someone else’s delusion, I said, and I’m not interested.

Now, someone else has used the same comparison in what I can only assume is a masterful job of trolling which went undetected. You see, Slate’s advice columnist is a man named Daniel who was, until recently, a woman named Mallory. (I promise, I read neither advice columns in general nor Slate in particular; this was all passed along to me by an informant.) Daniel’s advice for a reader who claims to have a 5’8” boyfriend who insists that he is actually 6’0” is to pursue a strategy of “acknowledging reality.”

When the Atlantic was publishing 7800-word profiles about Kanye’s genius, I grudgingly endured it. When Slate was analyzing his videos as if they were high art, I patiently withstood it. When some airheaded ditz at the Baffler tried to portray his shallow narcissism as artistic genius, I suffered it stoically. When the A.V. Club — back when they actually published interesting pieces about music and film before becoming just another interchangeable storefront staffed by snarky adolescents in the Woke Mall of America that counts as pop culture writing these days — kept genuflecting before his greatness, I politely overlooked it. Today, I have to say it was all worth it. All of it. I just hope the Internet is sturdy enough to contain the ocean of salty woke tears I’ve seen flowing through my feed this morning, because if the dams burst and that stuff saturates the earth, nothing will ever grow there for thousands of years and we’ll all starve to death.

But still, this isn’t a day for I-told-you-sos. This isn’t a day for noting that I was anti-Kanye years before it was cool. This is a day for laughter and merriment. A day for relaxing after an intense period of work and travel. Now flow, tears, and soak your cheeks! rage! flow! You cataracts and hurricanoes, spout till you have drench’d our steeples, drown’d the cocks!

I write in my notebook with the intention of stimulating good conversation, hoping that it will also be of use to some fellow traveler. But perhaps my notes are mere drunken chatter, the incoherent babbling of a dreamer. If so, read them as such.

Vox Populi

The prose is immaculate. [You] should be an English teacher…Do keep writing; you should get paid for it, but that’s hard to find.

—Noel

You are such a fantastic writer! I’m with Noel; your mad writing skills could lead to income.

—Sandi

WOW – I’m all ready to yell “FUCK YOU MAN” and I didn’t get through the first paragraph.

—Anonymous

You strike me as being too versatile to confine yourself to a single vein. You have such exceptional talent as a writer. Your style reminds me of Swift in its combination of ferocity and wit, and your metaphors manage to be vivid, accurate and original at the same time, a rare feat. Plus you’re funny as hell. So, my point is that what you actually write about is, in a sense, secondary. It’s the way you write that’s impressive, and never more convincingly than when you don’t even think you’re writing — I mean when you’re relaxed and expressing yourself spontaneously.

—Arthur

Posts like yours would be better if you read the posts you critique more carefully…I’ve yet to see anyone else misread or mischaracterize my post in the manner you have.

—Battochio

You truly have an incredible gift for clear thought expressed in the written word. You write the way people talk.